Google Interview Question — LeetCode 1376

In this post, we are going to discuss leetcode 1376 — Time Needed to Inform All Employees, which is recently asked in Google interviews.

Problem Analysis

A company has n employees with a unique ID for each employee from 0 to n - 1. The head of the company is the one with headID.

Each employee has one direct manager given in the manager array where manager[i] is the direct manager of the i-th employee, manager[headID] = -1. Also, it is guaranteed that the subordination relationships have a tree structure.

The head of the company wants to inform all the company employees of an urgent piece of news. He will inform his direct subordinates, and they will inform their subordinates, and so on until all employees know about the urgent news.

The i-th employee needs informTime[i] minutes to inform all of his direct subordinates (i.e., After informTime[i] minutes, all his direct subordinates can start spreading the news).

Return the number of minutes needed to inform all the employees about the urgent news.

Example 1:

Input: n = 1, headID = 0, manager = [-1], informTime = [0] 
Output: 0 
Explanation: The head of the company is the only employee in the company.

Example 2:

Input: n = 6, headID = 2, manager = [2,2,-1,2,2,2], informTime = [0,0,1,0,0,0] 
Output: 1 
Explanation: The head of the company with id = 2 is the direct manager of all the employees in the company and needs 1 minute to inform them all. The tree structure of the employees in the company is shown.

This is a graph problem to find the maximum depth of the graph.

My Thinking Process

We can easily translate the input data into a graph, and then simply use DFS / BFS to find the maximum depth of the graph.

Code Implementation

Base on the analysis above, below is my implementation of the problem.